AspNetEdit ready for release

Well, the Summer of Code is now ended. The ASP.NET MonoDevelop addin is now open
to testing, and although it doesn’t look any better than my
previousscreenshots, it’s quite
a bit more stable.

If you want to build the AspNetAddIn, just build MonoDevelop from
SVN with the --enable-aspnet configure
option. To enable the AspNetEdit Visual Designer you will need to build and
install the jscall-sharp library (available from Mono SVN) and you will
additionally need the MD configure option --enable-aspnetedit. The addin will
probably be in the upcoming MonoDevelop 0.12 release, although it won’t be built
by default, so it may be worth waiting for that.

As well as testing, I welcome bugfixing and new features. If it’s something big,
please check with me first to make sure that someone else is not
working on it already. I personally have a load of feature additions lined up
for the future, but right now I need to spend a couple of weeks sorting a lot of
stuff out, including this site, and sleeping :).

The Summer of Code has been fantastic. I’ve gained a lot of experience of
working with a large and very well-designed codebase, which I think has improved
my own coding a lot. I’d like to thank my mentor Lluis, who has been more than
helpful with my many MD-related questions. Thanks also to Miguel and the rest of
the Mono community for their help and support; this is a great community to work
in, and I plan on sticking around.

And of course thanks to Google for running such a brilliant programme. Not only
am I getting paid to do something I enjoy, but most of my favourite open-source
projects (Mono, Gnome,
GIMP, Inkscape,
OGRE and Drupal, to name a few)
have gained lots of exciting new features!

Update: Here are some known issues with AspNetEdit:

To get some items in the toolbox, you’ll need to add
$PREFIX/lib/mono/2.0/System.Web.dll using the button on the toolbox toolbar.

On Firefox 1.5+ the control selection handles disappear after a few seconds.
Mozilla 1.7 works fine.

The code from the design view can’t be saved with older releases of Mono.
This is caused by a bug in Mono’s 2.0 classlib (or runtime) that has been
fixed in SVN HEAD as of 11 Sept 2006.

The XUL/JS addin needs to be registered with your global Mozilla/Firefox
profile. This happens when you install MonoDevelop, but if don’t want to
install the rest of Monodevelop (e.g. if you use ‘make run’) then you can just
‘sudo make install’ in the Extras/AspNetEdit/chrome directory.